Chương 526: INTERLUDE_13.13 (526)

"Your target for elimination." Nenro received a manila envelope from the masked ANBU-nin. He pulled out a dossier and stilled at the sight of the photograph sitting right on top. It wasn't a headshot, but a full-body capture of a man dressed in a full set of red armour with two swords strapped to his side. He held a traditional bow with arrows in a quiver on his back and had a helmet tucked under his other arm. It was a samurai.

"What?" asked the young man in his mid-twenties sitting opposite him. Nenro handed the photograph to his partner. It was the final stage of the recruitment where ANBU was testing the candidate's field preparedness and competency.

They were on the third day in a city in the west of the Land of Fire and had completed multiple missions, from protecting a principal from an assassination attempt to stealing a package from a secured facility, and exploiting a critical flaw in the city's water infrastructure to force the local administration's hand to fix the long-standing issue. Now, they were given their final mission: the assassination of a Fire Daimyo's samurai.

"Is this right?" Nenro's partner asked.

"Why? Do you have a problem?" the ANBU-nin said, pointedly.

"No, I mean—""What he means is why are we being asked to eliminate a samurai?" Nenro said before the ANBU-nin could develop a misconceived impression about them.

"Why aren't the samurai taking care of this on their own? I'm of the impression they wouldn't be thrilled to get shinobi involved in their matters." Nenro flipped through the dossier. The samurai wasn't a good man; there was proof that he was involved in sex trafficking, forcing vulnerable and desperate women into a life they couldn't escape due to their circumstances and the threat of a samurai who could make their lives difficult.

If that was it, Nenro didn't think the samurai would have reached out to the Hidden Leaf, but certain parts of the file were redacted—not enough to hide the context. So, he got to deducing what else was being hidden, only to still be in shock when he realised why the samurai was going to die. He looked up and found the ANBU-nin staring at him.

"Go on, you found something, didn't you?" Nenro silently swallowed.

"… They're sweeping this under the rug." The assassination wasn't about stopping the sex trafficking, even if that would be an outcome. There were more people implicated in this mess, and the redactions looked like names.

If he had to guess, the samurai was using sex trafficking to curry favours from some very important people, and now that they were at risk of it getting out, they wanted the samurai dead to bury this whole thing before it blew up in everyone's faces and brought shame and damage to the Fire Daimyo's court and the samurai. This was about protecting some powerful people from the crimes they had committed. This was not about justice.

"No one wants to touch this," the ANBU-nin said.

"Yes, the samurai could handle this on their own, but they don't want to get their hands dirty, so we are going to do it. Do you have a problem with it?" he asked the duo. It sure didn't leave a good taste in his mouth, but Nenro shook his head. Refusing it would do nothing. He would fail the recruitment test, and the samurai would still be killed by someone else. Given the man's crimes, his death itself didn't bother Nenro.

"We will get it done." ———. Nenro stared at the contract sitting before him on the table inside the ANBU Headquarters. He had been selected to be an ANBU operative, and if he signed the contract, he would officially be one for the next five years. Tapir was sitting across from him.

"Having doubts—" Nenro picked up the pen and signed on the dotted line.

"I suppose not," Tapir chuckled. After Nenro was done signing two dozen pages across multiple documents, Tapir shook his hand and congratulated him for joining the department.

"You have six months for training. You'll have to pass some requirements within that period, but you can also learn more skills as well. We will provide you with resources like appropriate teachers and training facilities," Tapir said. He was the ANBU's Master Instructor and handled training—his duties spanned from ensuring new recruits were up to standard to organising the training for the ANBU staff to handling crash courses for mission-specific skills for operatives who needed them.

"Do you have recommendations?" Nenro asked.

"I recommend that you test for the basics first. By the time you're done, I'll have your assignment ready. Based on that, we can discuss what you can learn," Tapir said.

"About the jutsu archives," Nenro asked tentatively. Among the resources ANBU promised to all of its operatives was full and free access to the C-rank jutsu archives. He was thrilled that he wouldn't have to spend his mission points on them anymore and that he could start saving for his choice of B-rank ninjutsu that would become available to him in a year from his promotion.

"They'll be open to you the moment your paperwork is approved, at most by the end of the week," Tapir said with a smile before donning a serious expression.

"You will have a proper week-long orientation where everything will be explained to you, but I'm telling you this one thing now because a lot of operatives make a mistake after they sign the contract. Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

"Take your time deciding who you want to reveal your new job to." Nenro blinked and was about to say something, but Tapir asked to continue.

"We discourage sharing operatives' affiliation with ANBU with people. Ideally, we would forbid it, but we know that's not practical. You are only human and may someday feel the need to share, so as long as you confirm it with us, we will approve given that you follow our thoroughly tested guidelines on what you can share… I know that your family is back at your hometown and that you've been living with your hometown friends since you arrived here. Are they close to you?" Nenro nodded.

But ANBU already knew that; otherwise, they wouldn't have used them to intimidate him during the test.

"We discourage sharing with friends. Relationships can change—""My friends aren't like that," Nenro interjected. Tapir paused and then nodded.

"We have seen the messiest of relationships break up and the ex-partner kept the secret like it never existed. And we have seen what we thought were the most solid of friendships—trust that was tempered in the war—lead to the friend trying to sell the operator's identity to a foreign nation… I'm not saying your friends will be like that, but I'm just saying, relationships are difficult; they change with time or when one person outgrows the other… We don't want you to regret telling anyone."

Nenro was told that it wasn't an order, just a recommendation, and that they would understand and accept whatever his decision was before being requested to wait at least a couple of months before making any disclosures. ———. Two months into his training, Nenro found himself taking a tour of the ANBU Headquarters. It had been a very busy two weeks.

A big part of his day was spent at one of the ANBU Headquarters facilities outfitted for rookie training, which wasn't at all difficult, and the only thing remaining was meeting the physical requirements, pursuing which had put him in the best shape of his life. He expected to pass the requirements the next week. The transition had been unexpectedly difficult. The change in what his day looked like had been jarring.

Before, his days changed depending on what he was doing that day—different chūnin liked to meet at different places, missions took him all over the place, keeping an eye on new genin for when he sometimes led C-rank missions—but since his training, every day had been more or less coming to the same place at the same time, doing similar things, and leaving at the same time. He knew that people lived similarly without any problems, and he hadn't expected to struggle with it so much, but he did.

Not being able to talk to anyone—his friends—about any of it had only made it more stressful. The only thing he had been able to enjoy with them was his promotion. It truly was a hindsight. Everyone he knew was invited to share in his joy. His parents weren't able to come, but he had taken a two-day leave to visit them. In fact, with his new income, he was able to support them. He had talked to them about retiring, but they had laughed.

They were only in their early forties, and their jobs didn't require manual labour, which meant they were happy to continue working and didn't want to burden him. Seeing that they weren't going to take him seriously, he proposed that they move to the Hidden Leaf Village, but they firmly denied it; they didn't know anyone in the village and had no interest in leaving behind their friends and family this late in their lives. Ultimately, Nenro couldn't convince them to take his help. He didn't give up.

He was confident that if given two years, he could wear them down to rebuild the house that was built by his grandfather and to let him fund at least half of it. Then, once they saw how capable he was, he would work on his next goal to have them retire by the time they were fifty. It hurt that he couldn't prove it to them by telling them that he was now an ANBU-nin.

He had decided not to tell them because they were civilians and didn't understand the shinobi life despite being the ones who enrolled him into the academy. They were happy for him, but also concerned that he was now a chūnin because they had somehow heard that chūnin were at a higher chance of dying than genin. The problem was that they hadn't heard wrong, and it was very hard to placate and assure them. He wasn't sure it had helped.

Moreover, now that he was a chūnin, his contract with the village was extended for an additional fifteen years. They had sort of thought that he would complete his ten-year genin contract and then think about what he wanted to do with his life. Thinking about what he wanted out of life at twenty-one was going to be a whole lot different from doing it at thirty-six years old. He couldn't even imagine himself that old. In the end, he decided not to tell them about ANBU.

He was scared that if he made a mistake and they misunderstood him, it would only serve to stress them, the last thing he wanted. Nenro sighed and returned his focus to the moment. Thinking about it all was only lowering his mood without providing any help.

"The entire headquarters is built inside the Hokage Mountain. To this date, it's the most complex construction done with the help of shinobi and chakra. Do you know how many shinobi with Earth Release ninjutsu it took to carve out the mountain safely?" Tapir said, serving as his tour guide.

"Two jōnin, sixty chūnin, and three hundred genin over the course of three years," Nenro replied, surprising the Master Instructor.

"I took the recommended reading seriously… all of it." He guessed that there were a few books in there that others didn't bother reading. He didn't mind.

"Very good," Tapir smiled.

"Anything else you know about the construction?"

"They were helped by thousands of civilians. Everyone was divided into different groups with strict orders not to communicate with each other. They didn't want one team knowing what the other was doing to keep the flow of information restricted for security to eliminate the risk of a large leak." There was a lot of boring stuff in the book about ANBU's history, but the construction of the headquarters was among the interesting bits.

"What?" Nenro asked when he saw a look on Tapir's face.

"I'm thinking about your assignment."

"It's decided?" Nenro said with an excited and intense curiosity. It had been two weeks since he had been part of ANBU, but he still didn't know what he was going to do as part of his job.

"Can you tell me?"

"No."

"Come on, give me something, please." Tapir didn't say anything, but Nenro was expectant because he wasn't instantly rejected. Tapir eventually spoke, choosing his words carefully.

"I would have liked for you to go to the Foreign Branch, but the Domestic Branch needs more people right now."

"Domestic Branch," Nenro said the words out loud, feeling how they felt on his tongue. He liked it.

"No more," Tapir said immediately when he saw Nenro open his mouth to ask for more.

"Come on, we are moving." They moved to another floor, and Nenro was looking around, listening to Tapir, when the former operative abruptly stopped mid-speech. Nenro turned to look at the former operative to see the man staring at the other end of the hallway where a group of four was walking towards them. It was obvious that three of them were following after the fourth one, intently listening to what he was saying.

"Nenro, I think…" Alas, it was too late. Nenro's body was stiff as a board as he gazed at the boy leading the group, and suddenly everything made so much sense. With hindsight, he felt somewhat stupid for not having connected the dots.

On the other side, the group finally noticed the duo, and they stopped because Takuma, at the head of the group, abruptly stopped with a wide-eyed expression of utter surprise, like he didn't know what to do in the moment, which was so out of place that even his subordinates were surprised by it. Eventually, the surprise transformed into a heavy sombreness that said that he wasn't ready for this.